Sex Wars (27 page)

F
REYDEH FOLLOWED UP
on the address Madame Restell had given her. Yes, the landlady said, a young pregnant woman had stayed there, claiming her husband was in the West looking for work, but she had grown suspicious and asked her to leave. No, she didn’t have a forwarding address.

Every few weeks, Freydeh visited one of the few shuls people from the Pale attended—Polish, Russian or Lithuanian Jews—to ask about Shaineh. Winter passed into spring, spring into summer, summer into fall, and now winter was closing in again. Sammy was doing all right in school. He could write English and do sums and even long division, although the teacher said his spelling was weak. It was hard to dress him as he kept growing. He was taller than Freydeh and his voice was breaking. She redoubled her watch on him, for puberty was a time when the street might call to him again and seduce him from her. He was the only family she had, and she poured out her affection on him.

In January of 1870 at a storefront shul on Clinton she found someone who recognized Shaineh. “Yes, she comes here sometimes with her little girl. She says she’s a widow, but maybe her husband deserted her.” The rabbi was as young as Freydeh—if she could be called young any longer. “She uses the name Samantha Leibowitz but she told me her name at home was Shaineh.” He had a scar running through his brown beard—a scar such as a whip or a saber might leave. She could guess how he had gotten it and why he had left the Pale.

“How old is the little girl?”

“Just a babe in arms. Six months? A pretty little
pisherkeh.”

“Do you know where I can find my sister?”

“She has a job in a German bakery. Not Jews. She comes so irregularly, I can’t tell you more.”

She thanked him fervently, again and again. She put a little in the
tsedakah
box. Once she could have used charity herself, but now they were eating enough, with warm coats for the winter. They had quilts, each with a nice little bed. They even hung curtains on the windows so no one from the street could look in. They had decent secondhand boots to keep their feet dry. If only she could find Shaineh and her little girl, she would be happy as a widow could be.

Sammy did most deliveries, fulfilling orders at pharmacies, rubber goods places, the occasional bookstore. But while he was in school, sometimes she had to carry an order over herself. One of those times she ran into her old admirer Izzy White, wizened as a finger left in water too long, a small man with a huge voice booming at her. “So this is my thanks being so nice to you? You go into business as my rival? And what kind of business is this for a woman?”

“A good one, believe me. Yonkelman let me go.”

He pointed to the pharmacist. “Old Abey here, he says you undersell me. Well, I got a family to support. I need the money more than you.”

“I got a family to support too. My adopted son, my sister, her baby. And how come you said you wasn’t married, Izzy, tell me that? Carrying on flirting with me.”

“So I find you attractive, sue me.”

“So now I undersell you and I make better merchandise.” She put her bundle down on the counter and turned to Abe, the pharmacist. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Berger?” To him she spoke German. It seemed to her she switched languages every five minutes all day, from Yiddish to German to Russian to English and back to Yiddish again.

“She delivers good product, Izzy,” Abe Berger said. “My customers like her stuff. A woman, a man, what do I care? Just so I make my little profit.”

She collected her money and swept out of the store. Izzy was right behind her. “I never expected you would end up this way, Freydeleh.”

“I ain’t ending up yet. I’m still kicking and I’m kicking your behind right now, Izzy. So lay off me.”

“You’re still a fine-built woman, Freydeleh. I wouldn’t mind trying out your merchandise with you.”

“I would mind, Izzy. Don’t lean on me. I’m a good woman and I don’t take no guff from you or anybody else.”

“Who is this Sammy Abe says delivers your merchandise?”

“He’s my adopted son—an orphan, the child of a woman from my shtetl.” How many stories she had told about Sammy already.

She wanted to get rid of Izzy because there was a bakery three blocks from the pharmacy, a German bakery she wanted to visit to ask about Shaineh. Remember to call her Samantha, she told herself.

“You’re a user, Freydeh,” Izzy said. “You pumped me for information and now you’re trying to put me out of business, underselling me. You used me and I wonder how many others!”

She walked fast and Izzy didn’t keep up. He turned and left her, muttering to himself. A user. That made her uncomfortable. She could see herself flirting with Izzy to get him to feed her the details of manufacture. She had taken advantage of her job with Yonkelman to learn how the pharmacy business worked. Did she pick Sammy off the streets to use him in her business? It made her dizzy. She could see her whole life one way and then the other. Certainly she wanted a better life for herself, but for Sammy too. Had she taken advantage of Izzy? In a way, yes, but he had tried to take advantage of her. Did that make it better?

In the bakery several women, a man and a dirty little girl were ahead of her. After the woman behind the counter had waited on everyone except Freydeh, she said to the little girl, “Get out of here, you pest.”

“Just gimme old bread. Old bread you give to the rats.”

“Get out of here. Go beg in the street, you worthless dirty little beast.”

“I’m hungry. I’m starving.” The girl had a way of wheedling. She was Jewish, Freydeh knew. She was also absolutely filthy. “Just give me some old bread.”

The girl had black hair, not dark brown but black, dark eyes of Oriental cast like Jews from Kazan, but her skin, as far as Freydeh could see through the dirt, was milky pale. Freydeh plunked down four cents on the counter. “Give her a roll and give me a roll too.” It wouldn’t be kosher in here, but she had to buy something.

The girl took the roll and ran out. Freydeh made her usual fruitless inquiry. Nobody worked here but family, the woman said, and never had. She didn’t believe in hiring outsiders. And, she said pointedly, looking Freydeh up and down, she certainly wouldn’t hire a Jew.

When Freydeh emerged from the shop, about to toss the roll in the gutter, she saw the child licking her fingers as she sat on the curb. “Here, little one.” She handed her the other roll.

The girl took it and ate it quickly and totally. “What do you want?”

“What makes you think I want anything?”

She nodded at a group of boys at the end of the street. “They buy me a roll if I let them poke me.”

“Poke you?” Suddenly she got the girl’s meaning. “How old are you?”

“I dunno. Eight, nine I think?”

“How long have you been on the street?”

The little girl held up two fingers. “It was the summer with the cholera.”

“That killed your family?”

“My mama died having a baby. The cholera got my papa. So the landlord put me out and I live in Thieves’ Alley.”

“Where were your parents from?”

The girl shrugged. “I don’t remember. I was born on the boat.”

“What’s your name?”

“Katie, they call me. My name in school was Katerina but my mama called me Kezia.”

“That’s your Hebrew name.”

The girl looked at her sideways, mistrustful. “That’s not true.”

Leaning over the girl, Freydeh could see her bruises—on her arms, on her legs, exposed by the torn and too small dress. A bruise on her forehead her long hair almost hid. “Don’t be afraid. I’m a Yid too.”

Suddenly tears ran from the corners of the girl’s eyes. “Everybody hates me… Do you have another roll?”

Freydeh sighed. Sammy was going to kill her, she was an idiot, but she could not leave this child here on the street to be used sexually by the street thugs and beaten and starved. “Come. I’ll feed you.”

“Do you run a house?”

“What do you mean?”

“Helena, she was on the street with me. She was bigger than me and getting her tits and her hair was red. A woman came and put her in a house where men paid for her. But she got clothes and food. The woman didn’t want me. She said I was damaged goods, but I’m stronger than I look.”

“I just work making things and selling them. I’m not taking you to do things that are dirty with boys or men who hurt you. Come along, Kezia, if you want to eat and sleep in a bed.”

Kezia stared at her, frightened. She made Freydeh think of an alley cat being offered food, ready to grab and run. “What for?”

Freydeh shrugged. “Because a little girl shouldn’t be alone and hungry on the streets.”

The girl jumped up from the curb. Her eyes were still mistrustful, but Freydeh understood the poor child would follow anybody who offered food and a little warmth. It was lucky she had not been led down to the
river to be raped and her throat slit—yet. Freydeh couldn’t take in the thousands of children starving on every street, but she could save who she could. That was why Hashem had not given her a baby of her own body with her love Moishe: so she could save Sammy. She would keep trying to find her sister Shaineh, but in the meantime maybe she should take in this little girl. She had money enough to feed Sammy and herself and now Kezia—if she stayed. At least the child could have a meal to fill her belly and be cleaned up.

She would watch the child carefully. Sometimes street life made even a young child bad so that she would steal from someone trying to help her or would harbor a streak of violence so that you could never turn your back. Sometimes the street life was all a child knew, and they would return to what made them feel that that was how things were and would always be. She would have to see if Kezia was able to leave the street behind. In the meantime, the little girl stank of urine and shit and surely had lice. It would be a project to clean her up, for Freydeh would not wash her in the yard but in the privacy of their little flat. She would have to find her clothes. The ones Kezia wore were far too small for her, scarcely decent. She took Kezia’s filthy paw in her hand and led her along. The child was barefoot, of course. The temperature was mild today, a fine late October day, but the nights had been chilly. She could imagine the child curled up in her scanty rags in an alley full of rats and human and animal feces, the garbage of years of neglect. Kezia followed her willingly to whatever fate Freydeh intended, probably figuring that anything was an improvement. She had an old scar on her foot and a livid purple bruise on her cheek. Freydeh matched her footsteps to the little girl’s and pulled her along gently, never letting go her grip of the small, almost fleshless hand lest Kezia change her mind and bolt as they moved into what had to be foreign territory. “Do you remember where you lived when your papa was alive?”

Kezia pointed with her free hand. “That way.”

“You don’t have any relatives?”

“I had a brother. He ran away after Papa died.”

No help there. “We have five more blocks to go to where I live.”

Sammy was home already, studying with a book at the table near the window light. “What’s that?”

“A surprise.” Freydeh laughed. “This is Kezia. I found her begging at a bakery.”

“And you brought her home?”

“Am I for him?” Kezia asked, sucking her dirty thumb.

“No. Maybe he’ll be your brother.”

“Like hell I will… You took a year and a half knowing me to take me in, and you pick up this thing on the street?”

“I had to decide at once. Now, go get me some water and we’ll heat it and clean her up.”

She left Kezia and went into the hall with Sammy. “You’re special to me. But I couldn’t leave her there. I just couldn’t. She’s been beaten and ravished and starved. I felt it was my destiny to save her.”

“Just don’t leave any coins lying around.”

“It will take a while to tame her, of that I’m sure. She’ll have to be taught to be a little girl again.”

“She’s damaged goods.”

“She’s a little girl who had a hard life. If it works out, we can make it better. Only the truly evil are damaged beyond repair. Little girls aren’t.” But she had no idea if Kezia could adapt to life with them.

Kezia was standing in the middle of the floor as if in awe, turning slowly around and staring at everything. “You live here? Just you and him? Nobody else?”

“And now you. Who did you used to live with?”

“My mama and papa and me lived in the kitchen with a family and two other boarders. One of them slept in the kitchen too.” Kezia made a face. “I didn’t like him. After my mama died, he hurt me.”

“No one here is going to hurt you.”

“That boy doesn’t like me.”

“That’s Sammy. He will. You’ll be a good girl, and everyone will like you just fine, Kezia. I promise you. We all try to help each other here.” Why should Kezia trust her? Only desperation held her there while Frey-deh boiled water in a kettle on the two-ring coal stove, sent Sammy down for more, stripped Kezia to her waist and began scrubbing the months of dirt. The more she scrubbed, the more bruises and scarring she found. She felt like weeping as she surveyed Kezia’s tiny thin body. Besides the bruise on her forehead and the ones on her arms and legs Freydeh had noticed earlier, a scar ran along her back where she had been struck with something sharp and the scab had healed into a long welt. Her thighs were bruised all along the inside, probably from being used sexually.

“Kezia, you have head lice. I’m going to shave your head. You’ll look funny for a couple of weeks, but then your beautiful hair will grow back and you won’t have lice.”

“You have to cut off all my hair?”

“Look.” Freydeh caught one of the lice between her nails and showed it to Kezia. “Your head is covered with these. They’ve been biting you.”

Kezia nodded, tears in her eyes. “All my hair?”

“Just this once. Otherwise we’ll all have head lice before the week is up.” She wanted to hug the poor child, but she did not want to frighten Kezia, and it was also necessary to clean and delouse the girl before she was huggable. She wrapped Kezia in an old dress of her own—one she would have to boil afterward. Eventually Kezia was clean and her head shaven. Freydeh dressed the wounds she could and rubbed salve on the bruises. Then she fed Kezia bread and cheese and put on a stew to cook.